Conference on Occupational Risk Prevention with the five senses in Cantabria

The Cantabria Prevention Chair, the Cantabrian Institute of Safety and Health at Work and the University of Cantabria, in collaboration with the General Directorate of Vocational Training and Education, held the “Prevention with the five senses” conference on October 7 and 8.

The objective was to transmit preventive culture to the more than 400 young people, students of different training cycles in the autonomous community, in a different, imaginative and dynamic way.

The ICASST assembly hall was the setting for the presentations, each of them encompassed within the different senses of the human body. Experts have linked risk prevention and workplace well-being with taste, hearing, smell, sight and touch, contributing to a multidisciplinary reflection on sensory protection in the work environment.

Rafael Delgado, occupational risk prevention consultant for Fraternidad-Muprespa in Córdoba, participated with a presentation in relation to the sense of taste, in which he conveyed three key ideas to the audience.

The first is that taste can serve as protection in a possible case of ingestion of toxic chemical pollutants, carrying out a practical demonstration of how this sense responds in case of ingestion of certain compounds.

The second is that the taste-smell association becomes an extraordinary agent for risk prevention, alerting us to volatile toxic chemical compounds through the retronasal pathways.

And finally, as Delgado explained, taste is related to the rest of the senses to warn us of the respiratory ingestion of different biological contaminants.